Yesterday I celebrated a milestone with Dawn, our tenth wedding anniversary.  We ended the evening by mumbling and sighing how good God has been to have kept us.  Kept us sane.  Kept us together.  Kept us loving.

Marriage, to me, is hard.  I mean that two ways.  To me, marriage is hard.  And marriage to me is hard.  Though my wife has no other referent, she’ll gladly confess that I am right when I say being married to me is challenging.  I have been described as difficult, mostly by people who are themselves difficult.  They are difficult and they are, sometimes, right. And still, I thought throughout the day of my traits and issues and about how when we got married, there were many things about married life I couldn’t see.

The effort it took to renovate a fixer upper the first year.  Having to walk a dog early in the morning even in the cold.  Feeling unknown in a relationship when I was trying still to know myself.  The error in selling a house six months too soon.  The joy in learning about my wife’s interest in something.

Being thrown up on after tacos because my wife hated my cooking.  Just kidding.  She was really really sick, and I know how to cook.

I didn’t see how much I liked road trips and how little Dawn did.  I didn’t see the encouraging conversations of friends saying that they believed I was built to be good at marriage, even when I thought nothing could be less truer.  I couldn’t know that models would stand up and walk before me and help me be something I never saw everyday as a child.

I couldn’t see death coming to people we loved.  Breakups that shook us and made us pray when we really don’t pray much as a couple.  The strange tension that came with being a pastor and a husband.  The life of working all the time while going to seminary, the feeling that I could do more still, and, years later, the questioning of that same crazy mindset.  I didn’t imagine the pleasure of traveling to a few beautiful places and not wanting to go with any other person than my wife.  I couldn’t know how long it would take us to conceive.  I couldn’t see the arguments in the closet, the disagreements over big and little things, the silence between us after I answered one too many of her questions with–what I still believe is a scholarly answer–“I don’t know.”

Nobody sees everything when they stand underneath a preacher’s pronouncement or a judge’s declaration.  I like to remind couples looking to marry–and couples not looking to do so–that it takes work to see, to notice.  And it takes courage.  Even with work and courage, though, you still don’t see it all.  Even when you’re trying hard, you miss things.  You prepare and after preparing, you still need the experience to come and show you what a thing is all about.  You need the experience to acquaint you with what you don’t know, with your broken places, with your potential, and with grace.  Marriage has been like that for me.

A friend of mine sent a quote to me once, a quote I asked her to locate and resend because I heard it in my head, but couldn’t say it the way I remembered.  Unfortunately she misplaced it, couldn’t herself remember who said it.  I attributed it to Mark Twain because that’s who I thought she said it was from originally.  But, alas, it’s lost for now.  Maybe it wasn’t Mark Twain.  Maybe it was Ms. Anonymous.  Nonetheless, the sentence had something to do with seeing in a relationship.  I wish I could capture it in the concise way I read it.  I do.  It makes me less of a writer that I can’t remember.  Anyway.  It was something on the order of…people who see too much too soon don’t stay–or–sometimes seeing everything is really seeing too much.

I think that God is gracious when we don’t see all the things ahead of us.  Seeing, as bold a behavior it is, opens us to things that require maturity.  I’m glad I couldn’t see all of what would come in that last ten years.  And somehow I am looking forward to the next ten.  I mean that literally.

My wife wrote to a few people in her end of the year letter last December that she said to me–and I’ll close with this as an utterance of agreement, slightly revised to fit the post about our ten years–if we could make it through last year, we could make it through any year.  I agree.  I believe.  And may it be so.